In 2005, in the book and the exhibition Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (see here), Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel asked themselves how democratic politics could function better and what the role of things, objects, issues and art might be within that. Open24 investigates the current state of affairs in the theory and practice of the ‘Politics of Things’. What does a thing like ‘art’ do in democracy, how does art make publics, how does a thing interact with other things and people, and how does it influence them?

Jeroen Boomgaard shows how the politics of things offers purchase for actual practice, while Sher Doruff urges more abstract and philosophical reflections. Peter-Paul Verbeek demonstrates how art can examine the political role of things. Noortje Marres uses the example of the teapot to analyse the political role of technology, things and issues. Bernard Stiegler philosophizes on the technical condition under hyper-capitalism. His essay is introduced by Pieter Lemmens. Pascal Gielen proposes that the ‘Art Thing’ can encourage a democratic autonomy. Peter Peters and Ruth Benschop reconsider the public work of art Tilted Arc by Richard Serra. Fiona Candlin investigates the public significance of the Vintage Wireless Museum in London. Mariska van den Berg examines how the relation between citizens and the government can be reinterpreted by art. Plus, a visual contribution by Yvonne Dröge Wendel and her Object Research Lab, with a dialogue by Sher Doruff and Maartje Hoogsteyns.

While visting dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany this weekend I came across this beautifully published essay by Karen Barad – author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. The essay is entitled ‘What is the measure of nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice’ and consists of an attempt to emphasize and conceptualize the importance of (the Copenhagen interpretation of) quantum theory – related to notions such as measurements as ‘intra-actions’, indeterminacy, vacuum fluctuations, Bohr’s principle of complementarity – for a speculative philosophy that, interestingly, positions itself somewhere between OOO and SR. Being concerned with ‘the very nature of nature’ (p. 6) Barad defines objects or phenomena as ‘contingent configurations of mattering’ (p. 7) – which indicates that she is concerned with developing an ontology of becoming, or one that makes the insight that ‘there are no pre-existing individual objects with determinate boundaries that precede some interaction’ (p. 6) into its primordial commitment.Continue reading →

Fashion and paradigms are not the same; so much is true even on the outer limits of scholarly debates. The notion of performativity shows just that; a term now so often mentioned, elaborated, experimented with and both hailed and degraded – not yet capable and not even certain of becoming a paradigm. Obviously drawn from theatre and performance studies, performativity is ‘in vogue’ in both social theory, science and technology studies as well as in political theory and arts. Continue reading →